beta play blog 4: First Draft complete – next?

The sensation of completing the TV pilot is similar to consuming a much-craved ice-cream on a hot day, which considering I’m aiming at moreish television, feels promising. However, I’m suspicious.

I’m also slightly high on Final Draft – a software I haven’t used since my Scriptwriting MA. It has cute aspects of automation that make you feel like ‘a cinch,’ as Fred Astair would say. For instance, once it’s learned the characters’ names and frequent scene headings, it enters them like predictive text. As a Dyspraxic who (apparently) concentrates doubly as hard to type or hold a pencil (I type faster than most, just saying) I have found a friend.

The temptation to view the ease of this process as a sign of quality that will translate for many is real, but I won’t be duped. Rhythm and linear storytelling aren’t everything, although they count for a lot. As does finishing anything.

Now, I’m wavering like a dowsing rod between returning to the complex play, that needs tending like an intricate flower farm, and staring hard at the TV confection and drawing out its depths. So, what should these depths be?

What next?

The next question is surely – what will be meaningful for a broad audience? While I’ve written characters with a set of strengths and weaknesses, I want to ruminate for a while in their insecurities and the ‘tells’ of these.

The power of insecurities to guide people’s choices is something I’ve been thinking about lately – insecurities provide such unstable/unreliable signposts to the future but so often end up as the North-Star of why people’s reactions occur and choices are made. This thought is a good approach to inserting behavioural question marks into a drama, which will keep an audience engaged and referencing their own lives. So far, so good.

I also want to revel in an aesthetic that has a lot of potential for richness and strangeness – and therefore an immersive quality…something people want to live in. If writing is a form of therapy, I’m now looking forward to reading the pilot back like a picture book and making it more multisensory. I may even light candles for this…what a luxury.

There is also the question of sex. Not whether the script should hold a place for it – it’s a function of the story – but what function it serves where it crops up in the plot…beyond entertainment, and how viewers of varied cultures and proclivities might receive it.

…funny how stream of consciousness writing can structure the shape of other writing. Job done. Or at least – enough to be getting on with.

As for the humbled play-in-progress. I’ve realised that the two story-worlds – TV pilot and play – are truly like romantic relationships…I’m going to have to polish-off one before diving fully into the other, or otherwise risk muddying the uniqueness of both experiences.

So, although I’m tempted to move back into the new play with vim, it’s time to screech the breaks for a moment, and look back with curiosity at what has happened in a lick of time!

TF